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The Cataclysmic WoW disease

It’s everywhere, myself, Kaozz, Void, Pitrelli, Spinks and many others are all suspecting something is amiss with Cataclysm… but no one can exactly tell you what. The game is suffering from a strange disease and we don’t know what it is. We see the victims, friends, family, bloggers, guild members who are quitting WoW after only a month and a half of Cataclysm.

The disease appeared with the release of Cataclysm yet if you ask any of them what’s wrong they will tell you that they love Cataclysm. We all welcome the increased difficulty and the return to a time where heroic mean heroic, where epics are not raining down the skies and where it takes some skill to accomplish something.

Yet, ever-increasing numbers of players are finding out they have no interest in WoW anymore and are cutting down on playtime or quitting altogether. I have been thinking hard for the past few days about what might be the cause and I believe I have found the answer. Let’s bring out the big white board and figure this out.

First clue: Heroics

What’s the first thing that everyone mention when they try to explain what demotivates them? Heroics. Heroics are at the core of every discussion about why someone is tired of WoW. Time and difficulty are the two recurring causes given yet I do not believe them to be the cause. Rather, I think we’re looking at symptoms of the disease, important clues but not the real culprit. A lot of quitting players have been playing since release and remember very well the difficulty and how much time instances required. In fact, they welcome it…

Another important clue about heroics is that people in well organised groups are not suffering from the disease. That would seem to indicate time and difficulty again but the patient faced such challenges in the past… Still, the fact that one has to PuG or not seems to have a direct effect on the disease.

So what does non-Puggers have besides time and difficulty that Puggers don’t have? Control over their chances of success. By choosing with who you team with you know what your chances of success are and you have some control over them. In a pug, you lose all control on success and by the same token the time and difficulty of the heroic can be greatly augmented(or diminished if lucky). But the important point is that it’s not up to you.

Second clue: Changes to guild dynamics

If there is one big thing that Cataclysm has brought to the meta game of WoW is the way guild works and how we relate to them. Blizzard has made clear on many occasion that they want us to group together in order to overcome challenges. I’m going to quote Ghostcrawler here:

World of Warcraft supports a lot of solo play. However, we want dungeons to be a group experience. In fact, we think the game is more fun overall when you play with friends, which is why we put so much effort into encouraging players to join guilds for Cataclysm. Running a hard dungeon with friends tends to be a much better experience. Communication feels less awkward, and everyone is generally more supportive of mistakes. You learn the strengths and weaknesses and nuances of players that you run with regularly. There tend to be fewer loot arguments as well. PUGs have their place — don’t get me wrong. But we don’t want to sacrifice dungeons being fun and challenging for organized groups in order to have everything be conquered by any possible group. Make sense?

To make it short, they think that we need to group up more and that we need to get together in guilds. If you don’t join a guild big enough to run heroics or raids at a pace that suits you then you are faced with a simple choice. Either join a guild that can or be done with your progression on that character. Of course, joining a guild that runs heroics also means abiding by the rules of said guilds and that might be rules you’re not interested in.

Blizzard purposefully restricted the possible playstyles in order to encourage grouping. Unless you want to play absolutely alone and don’t want to progress far, you will have to join in Blizzard new vision of group play. We don’t lose all our options of course and someone stubborn enough will always find a way around but for most people who want to enjoy the game without fighting the system, we just lost some control over our play style.

Third clue: The new leveling experience

What else changed with Cataclysm that could explain our mysterious design? The leveling experience of course! Ask yourself this: Do you look forward releveling a character from 80 to 85 in the expansion zones? No? Why?

Could it be because you would have to the same quests in the same order in the exact same way? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

I don’t remember wich developer said it and when(would be grateful is someone know the reference), but I remember him saying that they made the new leveling experience so that players wouldn’t be lost. They wanted it to be clear how to progress through the game, what to do and when. Every step of the way you’re being told exactly what to do, when to do it and how to do it.

Do you see a theme emerging that could point to our mysterious disease?

The disease revealed! Lack of choice and control!

Blizzard wanted to make sure nobody would ever be lost in the complicated world that is a MMO. You are handheld every step of the way, told how to do things and even how you should play.

Want to beat heroics? Join a bigger guild. Want to experiment with your character? No need, we’ll tell you everything you need to know. Want to explore the world? Sure, just follow the dotted path! From level 1 to 85 everything is scripted now. No choice, no control over your own character. The defining trait of an MMO is to be in an open world with other players. They removed the open world and turned WoW into an online shooter.

Heroics are only the most prominent symptom but the more you look the more you see the same pattern. Blizzard telling us how to play their game and leaving less and less to the player. If the Blizzard approved pattern fits you to a T then it’s a perfect world. If not…

PS: Askimet seems to have gone berserk with posts recentely and quite a few comments were flagged as spam wich obviously were not. I am keeping a close eye on the spam filter and making sure your comments make it. Thank you for your understanding.

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I’m actually looking forward to doing the 80-85 run again – I’ve done it twice now, and I’m sneaking off to level a few of my more advanced alts so that I can do it again. The first time through I was in such a rush that I didn’t read most of the quests, didn’t take time to explore side paths. The second time through I paused more often, but I still didn’t get to more than Vash’jir and Uldum and a bit of Twilight because this was my farming character and she gather-levelled too fast.

I don’t find leveling is any more linear than it was before. There’s always a choice of zone to level in. Battlegrounds and instances have also become a viable method of leveling if you’re tired of questing. I’d argue that you have more choice on that front than in the previous expansions.

I admit that questing is probably the least offender there as someone with a bit of imagination does have alternatives like you said. My point is that if you do choose the questing road wich is the main way of leveling thhen choice become much more limited.

You say “If heroics are currently too hard to PuG, people can always do normals while waiting for the inevitible nerfs to hit. Or find something else to amuse themselves.”

I agree with that and it also proves my point that our playstyle choices are becoming increasingly restriced by Blizzard own design.

Being able to complete an heroic currently require me not pugging. I lose the choice of pugging and I’m forced down the guild path I might not have chosen otherwise.

What I’m trying to underline is that the game went through a fundamental gameplay change in how you can play it. WoW used to be great at offering multiple options for multiple playstyles but they restricted that a lot. I believe some people are finding out that they’re prefered method of playing isn’t valid anymore.

I think the problem isn’t so much a restriction of our options, but just the fact that changes have occured.

After Wrath people said that they wanted things to be more challenging, but after becoming accustomed to 15-minute zergs through heroics, going back to having to play carefully and heroics taking ~45 minutes under the best of circumstances (and a couple hours at the worst) can be a little hard to swallow.

Each expansion goes through phases. Dungeons and raids start out difficult and get easier. In BC the thought of pugging a Shattered Halls run made me want to tear my hair out – plus there was no dungeon finder so this would have been almost impossible anyway. Same goes for many dungeons in Wrath. PuG Occulus, or the ICC 5-mans? Not at all enjoyable when they first came out. However, time passes, changes are made, people get access to more gear, and all of a sudden these are commonly pugged.

Doing Cata heroics with PuGs is not an impossible task. It will take longer and try your patience a little more, but they will only get easier and less time-consuming as the expansion goes on.

After saying all that, I could be missing your point about guild dynamics. My guilds have always been a big part of my WoW playing (if it weren’t for them, I’d never play an MMO again), so the fact that people want to be able to do dungons (in groups), and at the same time be completely autonomous is a little foreign to me.

It’s a bit disingenuous to claim that taking away the easy pugs is limiting choices in a way that WoW wasn’t before. After all, the LFG tool was introduced at a later phase of the expansion in Wrath than we are in right now. Who is to say if LFG had launched with Wrath we wouldn’t have had the same issues with the first heroics there? You may not remember but in quest gear, Heroic OK was actually hard. So was HOL if you had a group that didn’t know what they were doing.

I don’t at all think that WoW has fewer playstyles now than at Wrath launch, BC launch, or even Vanilla. In fact it’s far friendlier to the casual who wants to see PVE endgame than Vanilla or BC ever were. I was a pvp’er in BC because that’s *all* I could do without a guild. Literally that or level alts… and I did both… but there’s no way the pve end game or near end game was anywhere more accessible than it is now.

You got me thinking there. What if it was Vanilla or BC who just released? Would I still play it considering my current time allowance and preferences?

If it was BC I’d probably still be playing and hyped. I don’t know how they managed it back then but like you I was unguilded for most of the expansion and never had any trouble doing most of the dungeon/heroic content and even raids on occasion. But back in BC with no LFG people got to know one another on a server so that even being unguilded you still had contacts. I still believe BC to be the best design we had yet in WoW.

Vanilla is more interesting tough. I would probably explore it and play it up until the end game but I would probably stop playing once I got solidly into endgame. The time commitments and requirements of the guilds were crazy back then and they would probably still be.

I’m starting to see the LFG as more evil than good. BC heroics without LFG worked well and Cata with it.. not so much (In my opinion at least). It did give a chance to be known outside your immediate circle.

About questing. Has anyone seen an orange or red difficulty non-instance quest since Cataclysm was released?

Not being able to attempt a hard quest has a serious negative impact on my wanting to quest. This may be much more painful for questing partners because I cannot imagine any of the revamped Azeroth or Cataclysm quests offering a challenge for a duo.

It’s hard to feel heroic (or care) when the questing content is so trivial.

My girlfriend and I are having serious trouble with Cata for exactly this reason. There are very few options for quests that are actually hard solo, never mind with two of us.

Wheras in the past it was possible to deliberately choose harder quests or group quests, questing through Cata as a two-person group is so incredibly unchallenging that we’ve almost stopped doing it.

I guess that we’re meant to go enjoy group content (dungeons) instead of trying to perform a solo activity as a duo, but the many well-understood problems of the LFD tool and the repetitive nature of doing the same dungeon again and again really kill that one as a fun option too.

While I do agree that it would be nice to have the option of some harder quests here and there, I maintain that it’s trivially easy to go off the rails and just go try to kill stuff. Challenge yourself, rather than just play by the questing rules. Go run around in higher level zones and see how long you can survive. Duo a dungeon meant for five.

There are ways to make the game harder and more interesting if you let go of the golden rope.

(And besides, why is questing the key here? Because of the story that nobody reads? Because of the rewards that are outmoded in five levels anyway? Because we can’t imagine doing something in the game world without someone telling us to do it?)

@Tesh
I have 3-manned all 1-80 dungeons with the wife and a friend, on various group composition. I even commented about it at length on several blogs.

I have 2-manned many dungeons. Again, it’s a playstyle I have recommended on several blogs.

I have 1-manned many level appropriate dungeons on my demontology warlock. I have not written as much about this one but everytime I did, I was very careful to point out both the satisfaction, the sameness, and the amount of time it takes. It’s not something I recommend for fun because I find it quite painful and I like this short of thing.

It is almost impossible to aggro a large number of mobs is a reasonable amount of time with the reduced mob density. The wife and I did experiment with the mobs in the WotLK starter zones when it was released (respawn rate was so fast) and we found out we could safely face 16 beasts our level (+ or – 1 level) on our protection paladin-holy paladin duo. It gets old quickly however because it is the same every pull.

We both soloed heroic Ghaz’an back on our hunters back in Burning Crusade.

I tanked the Prince on my boomkin back in Burning Crusade. In fact, the whole raid was only composed of boomkins.

We’ve done plenty of other unusual things.

But all these challenges (except for undermanning dungeons which is what we love best) were of relatively short duration. I cannot see myself attempting to kill higher level mobs evening after evening; it just become a continuous grind with no goal in sight.

Still, doesn’t that boil down to “it’s not about the gameplay, it’s about the rewards” of questing? Seems to me that’s not a comfortable place to be, as it’s always going to be disappointing at some level.

@Hugmenot,
If you’re enjoying playing off the rails, why complain that the rails aren’t to your taste? If you’re enjoying the play of duoing dungeons and monkeying around elsewhere (which is very cool), does the game somehow become less enjoyable when the yellow brick road is different? The stuff you enjoy is still there somewhere in the game world, is it not?

Also, regarding “short duration”, are quests really long-lived?

In sum, then, why do quests have to bend to the playstyle you want, so long as you’re having fun elsewhere? What’s the draw of quests that you wish they functioned differently than they do, when you can just go do the things you like without quests?

Note that I’m not saying you’re wrong or messed up, I’m just genuinely curious on this. If you’re having fun off the rails, why try to drag the rails to you? Why not just have fun and ignore the golden path?

I’m making the assumption that quests are appealing for the rewards or the story. That’s probably a faulty assumption, which is why I keep asking questions. Y’see, I’d rather play because I like the play itself. I can get that without ever questing… but that’s just me.

Do you remember the Battle of Darrowshire pre-BC? It was the one quest I would do on all my characters because it provided so many opportunities to attempt different composition. Could it be soloed? I was never able to on my paladin and druid and you would not believe how many times I tried and how much I was willing to invest in consumables for each attempt. Could it be duoed? I never managed it but I have a suspicion we could have done with my paladin and a friend’s druid if he had not given up. Could it be 3-manned? Yes, we 3-manned it using several group compositions. It was difficult and success was far from guarantee, but it was doable.

These non-instance scripted (quest) events which offered a challenge for the solo player or a small group were nerfed or removed from the game.

They provided us with many, many challenges.

I miss them.

As I miss the orange and red difficulty quests because they also provided us with an instant challenge. And we could do several in one evening.

Coming up with enough challenges to keep the wife and myself entertained for 90 minutes is very difficult these days.

The story is generally too over-the-top for me to enjoy. I do enjoy a number of the quest chains but these are exceptions, not the rule.

Quest rewards are a non-factor (as is gear for the most part). I am a rich in terms of gold and can buy anything I want should I ever choose to equip my toons with the latest and greatest fashion. But as I prefer challenges over gear score, I never aim to overgear content, even while leveling.

The thing is last expansion pugs were pushed on us. Things were easy, get in and out. Bad group? Well it will be over soon and move on to the next. Now it’s a different direction. You can’t expect everyone to be happy all the time about every change when a game changes SO much. Add in different class mechanics and it starts to get bleh.

Right now there is not a strong community and what the developers want us to do is pull from that (unless you have a guild) and work together, all of a sudden.

As for heroics being heroic… it’s group content. Raids are where the real challenge is at. People don’t want to waste large amounts of time, well I sure don’t, hours at that… on trivial content.

Questing is so tightly directed from 80-85 (and 1-13 in some new starting zones) that you aren’t playing by your own preference. There is One True Questline and the only difficulty color is yellow so you can’t choose where to quest, how fast you go or how hard it will be. This is in contrast to the leveling experience between 20-80 where there is still choice and variety.

Using LFD for instances was effectively doing them solo. That is, without having to interact much with others or coordinate tactics. Anonymous runs are what if you want the gear and badges but you don’t want to play *with others*. PUGs now are painful in a stupid way.

Required guild membership is likewise a non-starter.

Battlegrounds are a reasonable option, if you like them. However, if you like them, you’ll probably want the challenge of rated BGs, where the better players will be. Yet, this requires… a guild. Arenas are out. Unrated BGs are moderately playable if you have low expectations. Understandable if people don’t get excited about them.

Did you know that worgen can’t queue for BGs at level 10, when the feature is nominally unlocked? It drops you from the queue and says that the fate of Gilneas hasn’t been decided yet. You must finish the assigned path.

Archeology and gathering professions are viable ways to level and play on your own now that you get XP from them. Sadly, they’re also dull as dirt. World PvP is perhaps the one activity where solo play is interesting, challenging and up to the player.

Yes, I know. I’m not supposed to play solo in an MMO. Well, guess what? I can. I will. Even if I have to do it against the grain.

I completely agree. I was enthusiastic for Cataclysm, really anticipating hooked on WoW again before Cata hit.

A month and a half later my SO and I barely play, except for raiding guild (which is small, casual and plays once a week).

To be fair, that’s partly due to time issues. But when the choice boils down to A) join a large guild you might not like (and my previous experience with big guilds says it’d have to be a pretty special guild for me to like it) so you can do your group content/progress your character or B) don’t do group content/progress your character, that’s not a choice I’m satisfied with. Nor am I impressed that Blizzard’s made the decision to leave me in that unsatisfying, disempowering position.

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I think Blizzard finally gave people what they asked for: better quest lines, heroics being heroic, raids requiring raiders to play their class better and not just play simon says, for guilds to mean something.

You have more choices than ever. 10 or 25 mans for every raid. You can still PuG heroics. To gear up for raiding, you can still buy crafted gear, do dailies or grind dungeons and badges. You can level by gathering and archeology, questing or dungeons. You can still do PvP or fish. You want to solo something hard? Find the right dungeon.

Nothing has really changed about WoW. Its basically the same game. Just improved. More accessible. Easier to find the optimal bits, with a few suboptimal bits removed, and a few other suboptimal bits thrown in for variety.

I tend to agree, both my wife and I have quit playing. Crafting is dead, heroics are not fun, if I had to click on that stupid shovel again for relics I don’t want… you get the picture and from the look of the guild we left I suspect more will be following us, less people logged on each night, no one running heroics, etc.

We had both been playing since vanilla, and have done the raid scene, etc… Blizz went the direction it did in wraith because of player input, bring the player not the class, tone down 3 hour instances. I guess they forgot about those moves and the reasons behind them.

Other moves were simply being lazy on their part, ie, no heroic swords much anymore, specializations in professions, etc… all gone. No really useful crafted gear for most classes, the game was not finished when it was released I suspect.

I think the problem is people are just getting tired of Warcraft in general.The game is over 6 years old now.How long can that game keep you hooked.
Now you have Rift and soon Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars The Old Republic coming out.It’s not other games that will slowly kill WoW rather the game is a victim of it’s own success and too much of a good thing is eroding the magic of Warcraft.It’s no secret that Blizzard is working on a new game called “Titan”.The writing is on the wall and they know Warcraft can not sustain it’s current subscription numbers for much longer.

I have another clue to the odd feel of the otherwise technically successful Cataclysm Expansion:

Fourth Clue: Absence of a sense of “place”

The two previous expansions provided brand new contiguous continents. The base of operations was a new city within that continent. There was a continuous theme to the continent. You moved out from the major city to quest, and returned to it. You had a sense of your place within the new continent, and the zones to some extent had a logical interaction with at least the bordering zones. And you had to work your way to the capital city, as well.

With Cataclysm, we’re based in a familiar capital city that took no effort to find, where we really have no interest or need (other than Archeology) to explore or interact with the surrounding countryside.

We pop over to each new, independent zone with a teleport device. I have to keep reminding myself that Uldum is next to Tenaris, and Hyjal is next to Azshara, because they just feels like they’re…somewhere. Tol Barad is an anchorless island somewhere, then there’s a big cavern which exists…somewhere, and an underwater area that I will never have occasion to even pass through ever again, other than a quick teleport and taxi ride to the Earthen Ring quartermaster.

That lack of geographic involvement or any logical connection along with the linear questing has lessened the sense of immersion for me. In the new zones, I never really know where I am in relationship to the rest of the known world.

Much of the magic of feeling like I’m somewhere else really is gone.

I remember bloggers predicting that the LFD instance-teleport would ruin that sense of place in the game. It didn’t, I think, because it was added after most players had a strong sense of Northrend, and where they were, even in an instance. Perhaps having to quest on the ground for 8 levels also cemented a sense of place in the Wrath Expansion.

I wouldn’t mind the increased difficulty if in Blizzard’s book it meant something other than “horribly time-consuming”; fine, heroics are hard again and require some thinking, but the time-consuming part is hardly limited to dungeons.

Crafting professions are out of whack, justice/valor/honor points are a horrible grind, guild leveling is slow and poorly done for small guilds, archaeology is a tedious mess, etc.; basically the only thing that isn’t a grind in Cataclysm is the 80-85 leveling part, which I found way too short and easy.

Grinds are indeed nothing new, but we had options; my only option these days is to level a new alt if I don’t have more than 2 hours to play on a given evening. That doesn’t cut it for me.

I’m a very casual player who doesn’t have 3-4 hours per night to sink into a single dungeon run; I’m not asking for epics to fall from the sky, I don’t want to faceroll through instances either, but something fell completely off the mark since launch.

“I wouldn’t mind the increased difficulty if in Blizzard’s book it meant something other than “horribly time-consuming”; ”

I like that sentence, like it very much. It was true in Vanilla and they brought it back to Cataclysm. Time consuming is the one thing I never missed from the old times. Like you said, it only further restricts options for those not willing to spend upward of 2 hours.

I would also like to add that there is also a lack of choice when it comes to classes. For example, Blizzard decided to emphasize CC more in Cataclysm. Well if you play a class such as a warrior, your choices are limited. In addition, a warrior has no option to spec into CC if they wanted it. So the result is that you class is less desirable in an encounter that requires a lot of CC. The same is true with other abilities and classes. The problem is that if a person likes playing a warrior, they are out of luck and have little options to bring a needed utility. This means that some people will get benched in raids simply because they chose the wrong class. There is no skill involved with that and it’s a bit frustrating for the player. I think Blizzard should do a better job at giving the players the tools that they need to get the job done.

Ok, I’ll be honest, I am so sick of everyone complaining about ‘it is too hard’ and ‘it takes too much time, I’m CASUAL’. In the end of Wrath, with the LFD tool being out for a year, people came to think that PuG translated as ‘fast and free epics’ instead of its real definition ‘a random group of morons incapable doing the simplest of tasks such as interrupting, DPSing the marked target, clicking on a switch, or even moving out of the brightly colored swirly stuff on the ground that is killing them’.

If you are expecting to have any success with the random dungeon finder at this point you are incredibly naive. There are very few quality players (read people with a brain) left in the LFD because they are smart enough to run with other people who are also capable (i.e. their guildmates). I haven’t had a two hour dungeon run since the first week of Cataclysm. I have been chain running randoms that take 30 minutes tops including doing achievements.

Also, I don’t understand what would make anyone think they deserve to be successful in group content when they refuse to be part of a group. Yes you may have to make a choice – people or progression. It isn’t Blizzard’s fault if your ‘friends’ are idiots who can’t complete content in a reasonable time frame.

I’m going to bite, even if this smell of trolling, I was at first going to delete your comments because I don’t believe that calling people friends idiots is relevant to the discussion at hand. Or telling people who have to resort to using the LFD that they don’t have a brain. Then I realized you prove my point perfectly.

Let’s say your right and that in order to be succesful I have to follow your “guide”. Find a group of people with half and brain and join them. If my friends are retard then too bad for me right?

In short, there’s a right way to play WoW and a wrong way. Prefering people over progression is the wrong way.

So if I’m to play WoW right, I have to be progression oriented along with everything that comes with such a playstyle.

You proved my point, Cataclysm robed a lot of people of control and choice over how they want to play this game.

I think you have misconstrued my point a bit. Its not that there is a right way or a wrong way, rather that most people are in a position right now where they have to be honest with themselves about what their goals are. There is nothing wrong with saying ‘I value grouping with player x more than I value defeating y boss at z time”. My issue is with people who surround themselves with others who do not actually share the same goals (or who say they do but are unwilling to put forth the effort required to accomplish those goals) and then blame someone else, in this case Blizz, when they are unable to achieve those goals.

No one has to use the LFD. No one seems to remember what it was like just a year ago when everyone put groups together by hand, but of course typing LFM and clicking the invite button seems to be too much effort for most people.

I am also not saying that clicking the queue button means that someone doesn’t have a brain but rather that it is foolish to assume that you will be successful and incredibly irritating on a personal level when people go further and feel entitled that such a group should be automatically successful. That isn’t just my opinion, allow me to quote Ghostcrawler –

“…we don’t want you to stumble your way to victory. We don’t want you to be able to overwhelm bosses without noticing or caring what they’re doing. We don’t want healers to be able to make up for all of the mistakes on the part of the other players. While at the end of the day, dungeons may just be gussied up loot vending machines, we want you to do more than push a button to get the loot.

Ultimately, we don’t want to give undergeared or unorganized groups a near guaranteed chance of success, because then the content will feel absolutely trivial for players in appropriate gear who communicate, cooperate, and strategize.”

It’s too much to ask of the general playerbase wen you have 12M players; the pool is just too varied to pull this off; WoW is not a niche title; it’s as mainstream as MMO gaming gets, and that means lots of people who don’t otherwise play MMOs are playing WoW. This is not news, I think.

While rude about it, Cryptic is right – the good, serious players know to do heroics/raids/BGs with their guildies now to avoid the “bads” clogging up the LFD, particularly given the difficulty change. One great player could carry a team through WotLK heroics – not so in Cata.

Problem is – many of the “bads” don’t have guilds, or guild up with “social guilds”, play “casually”, and just want something to fill the 30-60 minutes they have free and feel like they accomplished something. WotLK heroics allowed them to do that – Blizzard set their own precedent there. The Cata heroics are a failure for them, and they want shinies, too.

The question they have to ask themselves now is: who do they want to cater to? I suspect the answer lies in numbers, and those are subs, and far more of them make up the non-raiding, non-elite population. Nerfs incoming.

I really don’t want this to turn into another debate between casual vs hardcore because it’s been debated to death and also because I know firsthand that wheter you’re a good or bad player has nothing to do with how much time you can devote to the game. There’s great casuals and awful hardcores.

As for WoW in an identity crysis. Yes but maybe not in the way you said it. WoW knows fully well how we should play the game if you want to succeed. The identity crisis would lie more with its player who have to constantly change their way of playing expansion to fit the mold.

Where before there was multiple paths open for different playstyles, some faster than others, now there is only one true path.

Hey Lono, I don’t want you to misconstrue what I was saying – the words in “quotes” are meant to be sarcastic – that’s hard to portray in text (and forgot to quote shinies). You’re absolutely right in that not all ‘casuals’ are bad, and all ‘hardcores’ are good; I am in full agreement there.

Basically, my point is that yes, good and serious players are grouping up with guildies. I’m talking people who really want to down raid content and value that above socializing. This does eliminate a portion of the skilled player base which leaves many other competent players (casual or hardcore) feeling like the LFD has become worse than it was in WotLK.

Furthermore, that Blizzard brought this on themselves by having WotLK heroics be the faceroll they were and then mixed it up to something significantly different in Cata. It wasn’t a small ramp in difficulty, it was a big one.

My ultimate point is that I think Blizzard will cater to the bigger population of people – who generally are not pleased with the difficulty level because of the time it takes to finish a PuG heroic. That’s what I suspect.

There was a big build up to Cata and then will all the pre-Cata patches there wasn’t much left for Cata. What really killed it for me was three days after release over a dozen people were online at level 85. Three days?? Done.

I avoided the new areas because I figured with 8 million players it be a bit crowded. So I started Archeology. I hit 85 without doing a single Cata quest or dungeon. WTH???
If I do quests now, exp is a waste. Now I just scan the Auction Hall for crafted items that are up for less than vendor because there is no demand to support the supply.

I haven’t tried the dugeons (don’t have the gear) but heard enough horror stories and find it very discouraging. What “raiders” were calling “too easy” I found challenging and frustrating. And if I can’t raid then there isn’t much left for this L85 toon to do except dust off the Xbox.

1. Heroics are too hard. Yes I’ve heard and I have no plan to do them.

2. Guild dynamics. Basically giving lots of prizes to bigger guilds. I am for now sticking with my friends in a small, 15 person guild so I guess I will be missing out on rewards. Sucks, but what can you do.

3. Leveling experience – for me, having to do 1-60 again feels like a chore, not something I want to do. I would much rather prefer 80-95 and never looked back but this feels so unnatural to have to “relearn” something you have already done. In a sense, just regrind all over again for no benefit.

When the time comes that I’ve seen 1-60 and gotten 1-2 guys to 85, I plan on quitting, not playing more.

As an aside – leveling professions which was a viable way to gear up for pre-heroics and raid is a nightmare. It that takes too much time for someone with a limited schedule and provides minimal payoff.

If you had time to level three characters to 85 I wouldn’t say you have a ‘limited schedule’. If your goal was to level alts, then you have been successful. If your goal was to gear up to raid then why did you waste so much of your ‘limited schedule’ on things that did not advance your goals?

Level 80-85 is the easy part, take 1-2 hours per sitting and you’re pretty much done in about 10 days; it’s even shorter on alts afterwards because you know your way around.

Mats for crafting professions aren’t for the faint of heart, having both a tailor and a blacksmith trying to go past 500 right now. I took my blacksmith in Hyjal to collect obsidian the other night, flew around for 2 hours mining every node I found and headed to a forge to make gain some skill levels; 2 hours of farming earned me enough ore to make 5 pieces due to the wonderful obsidian ore->bar->folded and elementium ore->bar->hardened conversion schemes.

In any case, I realized it isn’t even worth it to level a crafting profession right now, there isn’t anything worth making other than entry-level PvP blues using mats miners can’t even get themselves (truegold, which comes from alchemists).

Don’t get me started on tailoring, the horrible embersilk drop rates and dreamcloth crafting is equally as bad. I don’t have any hands-on experience with leatherworking and engineering, but it sounds like they have it pretty bad as well.

1. Heroics are too hard. Yes I’ve heard and I have no plan to do them.

2. Guild dynamics. Basically giving lots of prizes to bigger guilds. I am for now sticking with my friends in a small, 15 person guild so I guess I will be missing out on rewards. Sucks, but what can you do.

3. Leveling experience – for me, having to do 1-60 again feels like a chore, not something I want to do. I would much rather prefer 80-95 and never looked back but this feels so unnatural to have to “relearn” something you have already done. In a sense, just regrind all over again for no benefit.

When the time comes that I’ve seen 1-60 and gotten 1-2 guys to 85, I plan on quitting, not playing more.

I love a lot of soloing/duoing and RPing. It’s my flavour: I delight in the visual spectaculars that this game produces. And I loved the social chat: I met folks who also loved to combine their hobbies of fantasy worlds and computer gaming.

But once Burning came out, WoW wasn’t designed for my playstyle. It’s not a giant chat room with RP elements and tools. So I quit.

The thing that I would pie-in-the-face Blizz about was that they PROMISED me a giant chat room with RP elements and tools. It was on their web page. It was in the brochure that came with the box. They offered global channels. They designated some servers for RP.

But people are able to post very “non-social” text in the channels. I remember when a global chat channel was introduced and then removed.
And they have RP servers with max-level players named all sorts of non-immersive things such as favourite beverages or a pun based on the latest internet meme.

With Cataclysm, they are explicitly telling gamers what they deliver for lvls 80-85: a guild-focussed, medium-to-large group gaming experience. The yellow-text linear quest line and large guilding bonuses meet that promise.

It sounds like they’ve finally declared what their product is and delivered it as promised. And if that doesn’t suit you, do what I did and log into something else.

I think another one of the ‘choice restrictions’ that blizzard added was the talent trees. It keeps new players from making drastic mistakes with their talent trees, but it also stops players from experimenting with hybrid specs (such as Dreamstate healing for druids, or many rogue specs). And because there are so few talent points now, and the number of choices you can make at first are limited, it’s hard to not just end up with a standard, working talent tree just by randomly picking talents.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but there isn’t too much choice within talent trees at all now. At least, it sorta feels that way.

There wasn’t that much choice anyway – however many talents there might be there was always an optimal way to fill them with points. You only had some optional filler talents.

Sure, I was running on my warrior with a fancy selfhealing half fury half prot hybrid spec that was good for only one thing, soloing stuff. You could probably tank some normal stuff in it if you wanted, but it wouldn’t be very good at it. It was fun, but I had to give up my fury spec for it, so I couldn’t easily switch from prot to dps when I needed or wanted to.

Well, now I have a spec that can tank current content and helps me while I solo stuff. Others distribute some points differently and are for example doing a bit more threat in instances than me. Choice.

And what’s best – I don’t have to waste a whole second spec on it. Even more choice – rather than have two availaible playstyles, now I can get a dps spec and have three.

I’ve found that some specs have more choices than others. Resto Shaman specs, I’ve thought, have always struggled to have enough points to take all the nice things to have. Meanwhile, enhancement shaman used to use only 40 some points and stuff that was ‘needed’, and had a good 10 points to pick extra fun things.

Quite a few specs still have these ‘extra fun points’, where you can still choose to be more effective in one aspect or another. But you cannot chose to have a split spec (so that way they don’t have to account for that while designing talent trees). And if you throw all your talent points into your base tree, it will probably still end up alright. I’ve only skipped a few talents in the resto tree, since they were more pvp based.

I was leveling with Dreamstate so I could both heal and dps for instances on my little druid before she could get (or afford) dual spec. Specs that can do to things at once are always good, so it’s good that you can two things with one spec, so it’s like you have three for one.

I think this was going to have a point, but I’m getting distracted, so I think I’ll just leave this here. XD

Split specs were never really good (apart from the one or two very specialized setups), because you weren’t taking the ultimate 51-point talents. What’s good a resto druid without a tree of life? What’s good a prot warrior without shockwave?

It didn’t matter that much while leveling, but at the level cap you were just gimping yourself.

And now, even the dual spec costs 10 gold. And to top that, I was respeccing my newly-85 tree druid and found I can’t have all the nice stuff. Yay more choice! :)

@Saithir
If you had 3-manned many dungeons in WotLK, you might have decided to skip Tree of Life in a restoration druid build. The healer is expected to DPS as well as heal when we underman content, be it leveling or max level.

What I believe you’re saying is Tree of Life was mandatory if you wanted to maximize your healing efficiency. I agree.

But undermanned groups do not always have the luxury of having static definite roles.

Everyone seems to forget that LFD was implemented fully 10 months after Wrath was launched. At that point there were lots of raiders with great gear who needed to run a heroic every day for the Frost Emblems.

I doubt heroics are any harder in this release. My casual guild with entry level gear is able to finish them in 2 hours or so with 5 or 6 wipes, and getting easier. Why would I want to be easier any faster?

Running a random heroic should not yet be a very viable option, as many guilds are still learning them. I’m enjoying that.

That said, Cata definitely needs “doable” randoms (regulars) to have better rewards. The gear available from justice points is really awful and easier to get with reputation or cash. We should be able to collect at least a couple of epics by running lots of regular dungeons.

That would give back the “run a quick random” for long term rewards that was so popular in Wrath.

WOTLK dungeons, being faceroller easy when the LFD tool was implemented ~10 months after the expansions release, didnt require me to worry about wiping or to worry about the negative consequences of someone in the group not pulling their weight.

Look at how many badges one could earn in just a single week when one could run the daily heroic reward each day, then add in the weekly random raid badges on top of that and you had the great magical loot pinata that was WOTLK. Oh, and did I fail to mention that all the new WOTLK dungeon drops were epic to begin with also?

Now the difficulty pendulum has swung back to the HARD side of the scale, blues now drop from dungeons once again and Blizzard didnt think to make any changes to the LFD tool to enable players to have greater control over who they group with. That was a mistake.

All Blizzard has to do it remove the random factor from the LFD tool and make it a truly social tool by simply turning it into a browser where players names are listed once they decide to join the queue indicating they want to run a specific dungeon. Give me the ability to /ignore/blacklist players who are rude/clueless/underskilled and this whole PUG thing would cease to be an issue. Give the playerbase the ability to police itself and choose who they want to play with and things will be as right as they can be in this situation.

Throw up a battlegroup forum where players can schedule/list times that they would like to run heroics and let the players work out the details between themselves.

I still dont know why Blizzard thought it was necessary for them to construct the LFD tool in the manner in which they did, so as to completely remove so much control from the playerbase.

There is a simple solution to solving the Cataclysm issues – cancel your subscription. There are better MMO’s out there and I suspect people have been blinded by the WoW experience for far too long to see this.

Of course there are some people who simply can not stop playing WoW as it has become an addiction. Or they are stuck in a situation where they feel an obligation to continue to log in to support their guilds even though they now hate playing the game.

[…] Screaming Monkeys — The Cataclysmic WoW Disease “The game is suffering from a strange disease and we don’t know what it is. We see the victims, friends, family, bloggers, guild members who are quitting WoW after only a month and a half of Cataclysm.” […]

I quit WOW before Cataclysm, but after the Cataclysm mechanics patch. My issue was that I didn’t care anymore and wanted to do other things. I predicted though that harder heroics would be a fiasco, as even hearing about them made me not want to bother with it. If Wrath had never existed, it wouldn’t have been as big of a deal due to expectations.

In any case, if they want to stick with the new model, then they need to scrap the normal -> heroic -> raid path that also came out of LK. It should be normal dungeon -> normal raid, heroic dungeon -> heroic raid.

I quit WoW shortly before the expansion was released. Someone stated in a comment that Ghostcrawler was basically saying “Casuals go home”? I see it as the opposite. Casuals are more likely (I would think) to find the ideal spec on line and go with it over experimenting or crunching numbers a la “elitist jerks”. While the heroics may have been made more difficult, it seems everything else was made much easier. In my opinion, they are making it easier for the casuals in some ways.

This was only a part of my reason for leaving. The other reason is that I enjoy the RPG side. The talent list took some of this way, but so did paladin mount decisions. My draenei had a steed that she quested for and it was replaced with a different type of charger. To me, they changed my character against my will. I felt as if Blizzard had put a sign in front of me and said I could accept this decision or follow the exit sign. I followed the exit sign.

So I guess I left because I felt it was no longer an RPG, which was half of my reason for playing. It was now just an MMO.

Maybe we all need to be honest with ourselves and admit that we are simply burned out on WoW. Nothing wrong with admitting you are simply tired of the game. A lot of us had been playing since 2004. That’s a long time to be playing the same computer game.

I would also guess for many of us WoW was our first MMO (it was for me) and therefore holds a special significance. I give credit to WoW for introducing me to a genre I would not have otherwise considered.

Well, to me I feel that it’s less a case that WoW has stripped away choice in questing, and more a case that they have lifted a series of veils that obscured the hidden linearity of the game. Although some regions are very focused (such as the starter zones) and phasing reinforces this, the majority of mid to high level content remains about as choice-laden as it ever was; which mostly boils down to a preference of which zones you decide to focus on as you level.

Tools like the dungeon finder, the map tools that mark out where to go to finish your active quests, and the phasing mechanics that push you forward in to new stages are all part of the process that is giving the game a stronger sense of linearity, but all these tools are doing is clarifying what was already there. Unfortunately these tools can be annoying if you don’t like the feeling that there’s a guiding hand to your choice of actions.

Anyway, for me these are non-issues. I’m a primarily solo-focused player who enjoyes the questing content at a liesure pace, with only a few hours a month to devote to the game. I really hate the endgame content, and find it too be more stressful than enjoyable on average. Because of this, I actually found the new guild mechanics annoying, because they seem designed to push me in to a guild, to basically manipulate my social interactions by making them necessary to take advantage of guild perks from leveling. This, in turn, feels to me like Blizzard’s way of trying to change my behavior, to get me to be more interactive with other players out of necessity rather than for pure socialization. My best guild experiences in WoW have been with relaxed guilds full of other part-time gamers like myself who enjoy chatting while playing, but don’t feel that the endgame content is the be-all and end-all of the process. Under the new system, I see a lot of guilds forming that are there to get a bunch of people who would normally never care to join a guild grudgingly doing so just to get the extra perks. For some reason that seems wrong to me, although quite why the process instills this in me I can’t say. I also play DDO, which does very much the same thing, and I notice that it feels the same way.

Its sort of like Blizzard is trying to force people in to social groups specifically to see if that in turn instills longevity in their play due to the forced level of interaction hopefully creating new peer social relations, which in turn mean people will feel a measure of responsibility to their fellow guildies and not quit when they’re done with the solo portion of the questing game. Will it work? I have no idea. I generally feel that my predilection toward asocial interaction in MMOs and general dislike of forced-grouping is not the norm, but given how much the game caters to my style of play these days, maybe I’m wrong.

It seems soo many people forget about heroic dungeons before LFD. WOTLK was out almost a year before LFD came. The gear for lots of people was more then enough to make up for crappy people in pugs. Heck, BC heroics became easy after badge drops could get you ready for end game raids.

Its going to get easy through just the next patch and more gear for most people.

For an example. When naxx/sarth etc. in wotlk was top end raiding I had killed all but maly when I accepted an invite from a random holy pally that was trying to run heroic Utgarde Pinnacle, which at the time was still HARD! OMG! Just like Cata Heroics now!
But ya know what, I had to fly all the way to the summoning stone that the holy pally was at in order to summon the 3 worthless dps.
Upon arriving at the stone, I notice shoulders I hadn’t seen for a while, so I inspected. I was also smart enough to know that a ret pally with about 6 pieces of green quest healing gear and rest str/stam does not a heroic healer make. Needless to say, I simple pointed this out in chat and told the dps this was not happening with this healer. I still remember “Hey MAN, give me a chance1″
No thanks. “I just hit 80 an hour ago guys let us try it at least”
lol

Now, some time passes, LFD has been out, my guildmates and I down normal mode Lich King and now I would normally sign up with my balance druid guildmate for randoms, where he would dps and pop out of boomkin form to throw a heal or two for some boss fights, or switch to tree for the ICC 5 mans and the tournament.

[…] vibe that seems to be floating about. First of all… let me say I told you so! Remember my Cataclysmic disease post back in January? Yeah, the one where I said something was off with Cataclysm and it was killing the […]

Basically i agree with most you said here with some small adjustements.
I personally consider even though indeed 80-85 is extremely linear and presents no interest after two goes, the old Azeroth i really enjoyed going through again.But after leveling 3 alts that lost its interest aswell.

I think the biggest problem with Cataclysm is lacking free content.What i mean by that is anything but raids or high pvp (which aint really content, just the same old arenas).

The new BGs arent new at all.Just plain boring.
The new Wintergrasp , our beloved TB is just…ugh…whats that about.zero fun literally.
Daily hubs/quest are incredibly not attractive , at least for me.Loved Storm peaks/Icecrown dailies
Yes im a raider, but raids require effort and dedication and when im not raiding what can i do to relax and have some casual fun?Nothing..

Also heroic raids hm…doing the same fight again, wiping again for 2-3 days on the same boss.Yey!.At least Sinestra was cool.
In the end i really hope 4.2, 4.3 and so on will bring more fun to wow.
Cheers for the nice article.

There’s a lot of comments that I can relate to here. Reading it almost feels like therapy making my decision to quit go smoother. It’s like when I stopped smoking; I didn’t want to stop but I just couldn’t justify it to myself anymore. The negative started to outweigh the positive. I still love my guild (been the guild leader for years) and I still love the game and therefor I’ve been thinking a lot about what actually made me hate cataclysm. I think I was always more a fan of the World rather than the Warcraft and I find the game very biased towards Warcraft atm. Vanilla and BC felt like there were layers of content in the zones. Even if you were done in a zone it wasnt uncommon to return there at a later level just to discover a new epic questchain. Instead of making the world more mysterious, epic, whatever you want to call it, Blizzard seems to make it flatter. One quest chain and your done. Now go line up in LFD.

I don’t like the fact that Blizzard takes players by the hand and leads them teh path they want to. I remember doing the looooooooong totem quests on my 1st shaman, they were long and annoying, but they gave you a feeling of accomplishment when you finished then. Now I’m leveling a druid and all I have to do is talk to a trainer to be able to turn into a bear/cat/sealion/whatever. No more wrestling with the bear spirit in yourself. Leveling and questing has really become too easy, which makes me sad.

The linear levelling experience may be seen as boring or having a lack of choice, but the previous mechanism with that choice was a substantial hurdle to newer less experienced players.
Having to spend a substantial part of the time just trying to find where the next quests were or to find yourself stuck because of one you missed was not a good design and was simply an artificial barrier to first-time levellers and was easily overcome by those famillar with the zones.
Now pretty much everyone is on an even footing.
Heroics are meant to be rewarding, in that the reward at the end is actually earned.
If it requires some thought, so yes random pugs will suffer difficulties but is that really a bad thing ?
A random pug and not knowing in advance where you will be, and with what capabilities actually forces many people to play better, a reason to have an understanding of what others bring to a group.
Being in a premade all the time teaches you nothing.
I see rather a contradictory arguement here by which you complain about the ease of levelling and want the process to be harder, but then complain about heroics are too hard and you want to them to be easier.
Heroics are meant to be a raid readiness measure, and an opportunity to reach that measure.
Faceroll heroics give you awful raiders, which means subsequent nerfs for raid content.
A road we do not want to be going down.

My problem with WOW is something you pointed out, the fact that alot of the world is only doable in groups or guilds. I am a mature aged former player who works away for about half the year so don’t have access to WOW. When home I have to juggle a young family and wife wanting to spend time with me, so I don;t have the chance to build up those relationships to actually play the game; hence my ex-player status.

It is very close – but seen better theory, which perfectly described what I saw and also what you described here.
1) Wow is not actually a game :p instead it have(had) characteristics of a interesting job – that is why people liked it, not because killing 100’000 boars is so much fun but because there is an reward.
2) What are characteristics of interesting job?
a) Freedom of choice, you make your own decisions not having to do exactly as boss says (does this remind you something ;) ?.
b) Sufficient complexity
c) You work -> you receive reward.

Ps. It seem b & c are present in original post – to some extend – under a.
And as for disease:
Lack of choice + simplification + reward lost because you have to team up with id*s = why would anyone even play…?